By David Terraso
It’s been known as the Addams Family House, the Spooky House, and a few other names, but its true name is known mainly by longtime residents or those with a penchant for history. One of the oldest houses in Candler Park, the Smith-Benning House stands at the corner of Oakdale Rd. and Benning Pl. Originally constructed in the 1880s by lawyer, state senator and appeals court judge Charles Whitefoord Smith, the house was later owned by Augustus H. Benning, a merchant sea captain. He bought the house and the five acres that surrounded it for $6,500. At the time, Oakdale was known as Bell St and then renamed to Whitefoord Ave, a name that was changed on the north side of DeKalb Avenue in 1960.
The house was so large and difficult to heat in the winter that the Benning’s built a smaller home in 1905 that they could use during the colder months. The winter home still stands across Benning from the original house.
By 1981 the home had been divided into apartments and was in disrepair when Robert Craig, a professor of architecture at Georgia Tech, and his wife Carole, a respiratory therapist, saw a picture of it and fell in love. They moved in just before their son Christopher’s third birthday. They spent the next 30 years renovating it.
Carole: We saw a picture of the house at an Inman Park festival one weekend, and it had a for sale sign on it. When we got there we said, “Oh my gosh, this was the house we saw in a painting a couple of years ago at the Piedmont Arts Festival.” By Wednesday we bought it.
Robert: The house was, architecturally, something I saw some real potential in. It was a wreck, but I thought maybe we could bring it back. I taught the history of architecture at Georgia Tech, and I was interested in living in a historic house. We were trying to maintain the integrity of the whole on the outside and mostly on the inside.
The whole thing was totally unlivable. Two previous owners had started to restore the house, but gave up.
Carole: We had no walls upstairs (only original open framing). The house was in such terrible condition the fire department turned up with several trucks one day to scout the house for a possible test burn for training purposes and were surprised to find us living there.
Robert: The building needed stabilizing, it needed to be dry. It was leaking all over the place, the roof was ancient and rooms throughout the house had false ceilings that compromised the authenticity of the historic volumes; the whole house had to be replastered. For most of the restoration time we lived in this 650-700 square-feet of space (downstairs in what’s now the kitchen) probably for 25 of those 30 years and just operated in slow motion working on the house piece by piece.
Carole: The whole neighborhood was very inexpensive then; older people were dying and their children didn’t want to live here. It was what I called the earth people moved in. It wasn’t hippies, it was more “we have no money and we’re artists.” And they came in here and bought or rented and lived happily for a long time. Some of them grew older and stayed. So the neighborhood slowly evolved.
Robert: From the outside it’s never been changed. The windows are exactly the same. We added the rear deck using 1×4 ipe wood to give it a verandah appearance, built (2004-6) the adjacent new storage/workshop/garage to be compatible, and we did all the brick work in the driveway. The house is basically four rooms up and four rooms down. We restored the four upstairs bedrooms with three baths and unfinished attic above. Downstairs we have a living room, dining room, my office, a den, and the kitchen, with crawl space below. The kitchen has more of an Arts and Crafts character, whose design features were inspired by Greene and Greene, Bernard Maybeck and Frank Lloyd Wright. 
Carole: There’s not much closet space in the house. We always need more closet space.
We’d renovate a bit, sit around a bit saving money, then do a bit more.
One thing that’s nice about Candler Park is everybody is very patient with everybody else as they try to fix up their houses. We had people who’d come over and say, ‘We got fed up with fixing up our house. We were so depressed. So, we came over to see your house and we realized how far we’ve gotten along and we’re not depressed anymore!’
Robert: ‘Nothing could be worse than yours!’ they’d say, as though their visit to our wreck of a house was therapy.
In terms of style, the house is Eastlake Victorian, which makes reference to an architect named Charles Eastlake who published an influential interior design book entitled Hints on Household Taste. The tower is Italian, leftover from the mid-19th century Italian villa style, and the fact that there is a mansard roof on the tower adds a French Second Empire character, so there’s an eclectic quality over all.
When I go out to the street-side mailbox and find people outside photographing the house, they think I’m coming out to chase them away, so I say “No, no, no, that’s alright.”
We had a television Halloween special made in here before we renovated. They commented that what they liked about the house was they really wouldn’t have t
o decorate.
It was a TV movie aired on WSB many years ago. Essentially someone had rewritten Faust, in a story in which some guy had sold his soul to the devil to become the great pool shark of history. So the different scenes would have him playing pool with different people out of history, one of them was Marie Antoinette, as though she played pool. Somebody else was a riverboat gambler and somebody else was W.C. Fields. The 30 second promos were better than the house show.
Carole: I hope new residents of Candler Park are people coming in because they like the historic nature of the neighborhood and the houses. I hope the community stays eclectic because that’s another nice feature of the neighborhood. There’s a big variety of people here, different occupations, different types of people. People here appear to love their houses, you know? They are “I live in my house,” rather than “I park in my house.”
I think a historic neighborhood also attracts people who value history and their connection with each other. You become a community. And because we have front porches, in the summer people are out on them, and when people go by, you talk to each other, and that doesn’t happen in every part of the city.
The Smith-Benning House was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982. Candler Park neighborhood was listed fifteen months later in 1983.